Violence in Iraq left nearly 50 people dead Monday in a suicide car bombing and clashes between Shiite militia and Iraqi security forces, a brutal contradiction of the prime minister's claim that bloodshed was decreasing. The deaths followed a day of bombings and shootings on Sunday, when more than 60 people were killed across the country, from the northern city of Kirkuk to the capital Baghdad and down to the south in Basra. The dead included eight American soldiers, one of the deadliest weekends for the U.S. military in recent months. In the city of Diwaniyah, gunbattles between Iraqi forces and militiamen of the Mahdi Army loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr left at least 34 people dead and about 70 wounded, Iraqi officials said. The fighting broke out late Sunday night when Iraqi soldiers conducted raids in three neighborhoods to flush out the militiamen and seize weapons, said army Capt. Fatik Aied. He said the fighting continued Monday. ... http://www.kltv.com

The world's oldest person, a 116-year-old Ecuadorean woman, died on Sunday less than a month before her birthday, her relatives told local newspapers on Monday. Maria Esther de Capovilla was declared the world's oldest person in December by Guinness World Records, lifting the title from a U.S. woman.Elizabeth Bolden, from Memphis, Tennessee, born August 15, 1890, had previously been regarded as the oldest living person.Capovilla was born in Guayaquil in western Ecuador on September 14, 1889, and lived with her daughter-in-law and son. She had five children, 11 grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren, local media said.Her husband died in 1949....http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060828/ts_nm/ecuador_oldest_dc

United Nations chief Kofi Annan has called on Israel to lift its blockade of Lebanon and urged Hezbollah to free two captured Israeli soldiers. Speaking after talks in Beirut, he said he was working for an immediate end to the sea and air blockade and the troops should be handed over to the Red Cross. Mr Annan is on a regional tour to try to prop up the two-week-old ceasefire. The secretary general said the truce had created a chance for a "long-term ceasefire and a long-term peace". All sides in the conflict had to implement the UN resolution which brought an end to the fighting, he said. Discussions also focused on the deployment and role of 15,000 UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. Last week, the secretary general secured a pledge by EU countries to provide thousands of soldiers for the UN force. The force was authorised under the UN-backed ceasefire which ended the four-week conflict earlier this month. ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5291796.stm

Every time you use an internet search engine, your inquiry is stored in a huge database. Would you like such personal information to become public knowledge? Yet for thousands of AOL customers, that nightmare has just become a reality. Andrew Brown reports on an incident that has exposed how much we divulge to Google & co. What was published by AOL represents only a tiny fraction of the accumulated knowledge warehoused within Google's records - but it has given all of us, as users, a dramatic and unsettling glimpse of how much, and in what intimate detail, the big search engines know about us.The number of searches Google carries out is a secret, but comScore, an independent firm, reckons that the search engine performed 2.7bn searches by American users alone in July this year. Yahoo, its main rival, conducted around 1.8bn American searches in the same month; Microsoft's MSN around 800m and AOL 366m....http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/search/story/0,,1859785,00.html

Search engine Google is launching a range of free software programmes for companies, to build on its existing communication services. The move places Google, whose focus has been searching and advertising, in direct competition with Microsoft, as it updates its Office package. Google says it is answering a demand from firms for entire software packages, over individual services. Later this year, Google will offer a paid-for version of the software. The price of such a version, which would not hold any advertisements, has yet to be set. ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5292168.stm

The taxi route for commercial jets using Blue Grass Airport’s main runway was altered a week before Comair Flight 5191 took the wrong runway and crashed, killing all but one of the 50 people aboard, the airport’s director said Monday. Both the old and new taxiways cross over the shorter general aviation runway where the commuter jet tried to take off early Sunday, Blue Grass Airport Executive Director Michael Gobb told The Associated Press. The runway repaving was completed late on the previous Sunday, Gobb said. It wasn’t clear if the Comair pilots aboard Flight 5191 had been there since the change. Comair operates that regular 6 a.m. weekend flight to Atlanta from Lexington, but another commuter airline takes over that commute during the week. “It’s slightly different than it used to be,” said Charlie Monette, president of Aero-Tech flight school, which is based at the airport. “Could there have been some confusion associated with that? That’s certainly a possibility.” ...http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14552288/